I find that manually reconciling my accounts (bank, credit card, etc) forces me to think about the money I spend. For years I used Microsoft Money. After they discontinued it, I even used their “sunset edition”. I got tired of having to keep a Windows box around for it, and it didn’t run well on Wine, so I wrote my own replacement. It has changed over time. I think it started out as a desktop app using Qt. The current version is a web app written in Go using html/template, and a rewrite is in progress that includes htmx. There have been versions ranging from curses to express and react. This has basically become my test program to write whenever I want to play with a new technology, as I know the problem space pretty well at this point.
I’ve also written code for Arduino and for rtlsdrs to read my smart water meter’s RF mesh network and insert the data into influx / Grafana. This project came about after my city utility office called me when I was on vacation to ask if I was filling a pool. Turns out a toilet had been stuck running for days.
Yeah, I’ve read all the stories. Unfortunately my wife loves the car, and while it is paid off, it isn’t worth much on the secondary market, so we plan to just drive it until it dies.
As someone currently adding 1qt every 1000 miles to their 2017 Tucson, I chuckled. Between their oil consumption issues, the spontaneous combustion issues, and the cost cutting immobilizer saga, I won’t buy anything from Hyundai/Kia again.
Another vote for TP-Link here. I’m a big fan of how easy it is to adopt new devices too. Most recently I had to add a switch for work VLAN purposes. While waiting for it to arrive, I preconfigured the VLANs in the controller. When it arrived, it was basically just plug and play.
You can still use Microsoft Money sunset edition completely offline. I did this myself until about 2 years ago, when I broke down and wrote a simple web app to fill the need.
I loved my 2006 xB (thunder cloud metallic, manual transmission). It was the first new car I purchased. Traded it in a couple years later and regretted it.
I have one of those Intel “stick PCs”. I keep it running in my server rack for anything I need Windows for. It is not fast, but at like 2W idle, I don’t worry about leaving it running all the time. I just RDP into it when I need it.
I also have a few of those “mini PCs” around the house for various things. One is my “server” (NAS, docker host, etc), one is a Proxmox host so I can spin up random VMs as needed, and my son uses one as a gaming PC.
For me personally, I find myself reaching for go + html/template + sqlite unless requirements lead me towards something else. It is simple and straightforward, and gives me decent velocity. In the past I might have said express + react, but the number of dependencies those pull in just gives me an uneasy feeling. I like sticking to the standard library as much as possible. At work where I’m in Visual Studio most of the time, asp.net core + entity framework core is easy to work with too.
I use rtlamr to receive and record my natural gas usage, and I wrote some code to receive my water usage from my water meter (though I’ve since moved that code to an Adafruit Feather w/ an RFM69 module).
I’ve been rocking a Latitude 7370 for around 5 years now. Picked it up used in 2018 for $475. It has been a great machine. Works great under Fedora. 3200x1800 touch screen, 16GB ram. Swapped the m.2 SATA SSD for an NVMe drive. It’s not a super powerful machine, and the battery life could be better, but overall I really like it.
Believe it or not, the legacy point of sale product I work on still uses a VB6 app for the cash office and reporting functions. A number of large grocery stores still use it in the US and abroad. I don’t work on that part of the application, but it still works just fine on Windows 11.
E cores have been the bane of my existence at $dayjob. I received a new laptop a while back with an i7-12800H. I make heavy use of VMware workstation virtual machines under Windows. It kept wanting to put my VMs on the E cores, which meant they crawled and showed 100% CPU usage inside the guest, but the host was mostly idle. Luckily others had run into this issue and shared some configuration settings (powercfg /powerthrottling /disable) to exempt the VMware processes. I lost so much time tracking that down, I almost went back to the old laptop.
Traditional point of sale systems generally have the notion of a “transaction log” or “tlog” which is a sequence of events within the transaction including items sold and their price at the time.
Go find a well established company where you can work on an existing product. I work on a legacy point of sale product that started life in the 80’s and is still powering a good chunk of commerce around the world. I work on a small yet efficient team who customize the product for retailers. It is all about the team you’re on though. My company is also releasing all kinds of new products and services. I doubt anyone would describe working on those teams as calm.
A good number of digital coupons are manufacturer coupons. (I work in this space)
Kroger is usually pretty good about adding shelf tags that highlight the digital coupon.
I much prefer digital coupons to paper coupons that I always seem to forget. But I understand that there is a significant portion of the population who prefer paper coupons instead.
As for the topic of the post, I absolutely think regulators need to step in block the Kroger / Albertsons merger. We need more competition, not less.
I recently got a new work laptop that came with Windows 11. I haven’t really noticed any differences aside from the new Windows Terminal (which I like a lot and have integrated with git bash), new Task Manager, and some visual changes. I still prefer to run Linux on my personal systems.
I actually used to have that issue years ago at work. To work around that I just enabled a keepalive (ServerAliveInterval maybe?) setting in my ssh config. I don’t connect to any ssh servers outside my house for long periods of time, so I haven’t encountered that. Thanks for the heads up, good info!